Tuesday, March 31, 2009

The trouble with "You"

A hymnal editor struggles with "you." It's a great post here.

A sample:

It seems to me that modern English is entirely too flexible. Or to put it another way, we have achieved a flexibility in English at the expense of both accuracy and nuance. Examples:

* "you" - singular or plural? And why do we not have a way to tell at a glance? I'm all for context, but sometimes, you know, you just want to know.

* "you" - familiar or formal? Have we lost something by not making this distinction in speech and writing?

I understand (see "ignorance alert" above) that in modern languages where this distinction still exists, actual usage tends toward the familiar anyway. That's apparently the way of the world, whether in the U.S. or Italy or Germany. My nascent monarchist (or is it just elitism?) mourns that in common usage. But especially in hymn singing and prayers.

This is why I still stumble over changing all the "Thee" and "Thou" language in older hymns. (I won't even address here how our democratic orthography has lowered the case on these words when used for the Divine.) "Thee" is changed to "you" and "Thou" is changed to "you." So we miss several aspects of language -- grammar: object or subject? number: are we addressing the One or the many? address: formal or familiar? And we can end up with a hymn full of the word "you" with many applications . . . and that may sound goofy to sing over and over again.

Read the whole article here.

1 comment:

Quiremaster said...

Interesting, since I learned in Shakespeare class in college years ago that "thou" was actually the familiar, while "you" was more formal. See the final arbiter of all wisdom: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou